Olivia Nuzzi breaks down in tears when grilled about withholding damaging RFK Jr. secrets: ‘I was afraid’
Former political journalist Olivia Nuzzi burst into tears while trying to defend her decision to withhold dirt on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming she was “terrified” of her ex-fiance, onetime Politico scribe Ryan Lizza.
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller grilled Nuzzi, 32, over why she didn’t share information she knew about Kennedy, 71, during his brutal confirmation process and pressed her on whether she still loved the Trump Cabinet member.
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“I don’t know how to responsibly handle this on camera,” Nuzzi said after stammering a bit. “I’m writing in that scene that you’re talking about — about how I felt privately.”
In her new book, “American Canto,” Nuzzi described being in love with Kennedy, whom she described only as “the Politician.” But Miller noted that Nuzzi also fessed up to taking steps to aid the Kennedy scion, whom he argued is now doing “bad things” in his powerful position.
“I lost my job. I was fired and I was in hiding and I was afraid,” Nuzzi insisted calmly before growing emotional. “I was terrified of the man I did not marry [Lizza] and I was very worried about people knowing where I was.”
The Vanity Fair West Coast editor then wept and pleaded for a pause in the interview before apologizing to a visibly uncomfortable Miller.
“A lot of my whole, the last year was just, you know, my whole life was destabilized,” she reflected after returning from the break.
Among the revelations about Kennedy that Nuzzi discusses in the book is his use of the powerful hallucinogen Dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
“He was telling me privately that, in fact, he was not sober and he was hiding it not just from the public, but from his own wife,” Nuzzi claimed, noting that she “can only tell you so much” because she wasn’t administering the drugs.
Kennedy has declined to publicly comment on the scandal — though his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, has privately bashed Nuzzi as a “f—ing liar,” The Post previously reported.
Nuzzi had been a star political reporter at New York magazine, but her reputation went up in flames after the outlet fired her last year following its discovery of the sordid digital tryst with Kennedy.
Anticipating “American Canto,” Lizza, 51, has published a multi-part tell-all on his Telos News substack, claiming that Nuzzi flouted journalism ethics by acting as an unofficial adviser to Kennedy’s abortive independent campaign for the presidency in 2024.
“I had f—ed up, right? I did something wrong. Like, those ethics rules exist for a reason. They’re really good rules. And I had violated that,” Nuzzi reflected.
“When he [Kennedy] would ask my opinion or ask for advice, my approach was Socratic,” she claimed. “And any time I gave prescriptive advice, he never took it.”
Nuzzi also lashed out at Lizza, who is now dating a former staffer for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, Caroline Motley.
Motley, 28, is a hardcore pro-choice activist who has described herself as a man-hating “misandrist.” She’s also nearly a quarter-century younger than Lizza.
“He has presented his harassment of me, and this humiliation campaign, as some sort of crusade that’s in the public interest — that somehow the country will be saved by him writing some combination of like fan fiction and revenge porn,” Nuzzi raged about her ex-fiance, whose writing she compared to a “suicide bomber’s manifesto.”
“The only responsible way for him to handle that information as a journalist, he would know this, would be to quietly pass it off to an organization that doesn’t have his conflicts,” she added. “Because his conflicts make it so that — that information could be readily dismissed.”
However, Nuzzi similarly felt comfortable waiting to dish about her experiences with Kennedy until the publication of her book, rather than passing that information off to another reporter.
“I got very upset at a certain point when they sent the books to print. It occurred to me just how serious it is to kill so many trees to print your book,” she recalled.
“I took that really seriously, and it’s not an effort to brand myself in any particular way.”
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